I don't have much experience interviewing people, I only hired in total about 40 or so, and interviewed maybe twice that. One thing I've never done though is to go into an interview with a prepared list of questions.
First I would try to get a feeling for the personality of the person applying for he job, to see if they would fit in, then I'd try to gage whether or not they had the required background for the job, and I might follow up with a question or two about that background.
A few people were caught fibbing and the interview was gracefully terminated. But for the most part, the people that showed up were honest and fairly candid about what they could and could not do. I've never felt the need to resort to 'trick' or 'puzzle' questions or questions that were meant to trip them up.
Psychological games with people that are already nervous tend to have weird outcomes, better to get them to be relaxed and to tell you what you need to know freely.
One guy even admitted to having stolen some office supplies from a previous employer (he had a hole in his resume).
The employer fired him on the spot but he was very capable, he'd learned his lesson and I ended up hiring him, he was quite amazed at being hired and was one of the best people we ever had working for us. And honest to a fault, certainly learned his lesson.
A couple of months ago one of my not-so-successful hires sent me a long letter of apology about some stupid stuff he'd pulled many years ago. I'd long since forgiven and forgotten, but it's quite amazing how decent most people are deep down. As an employer your main role is to bring that out in people. If you start by casting the relationship in terms of trick questions and such I think you're off on the wrong foot.
But then again, that seems to be the norm, so maybe I'm the one that's in the wrong. I haven't had people working for me for the last 4 years, and I don't think I ever will again, but still I wouldn't change much in the way of conducting interviews.
Probably the size of the organization doing the interviewing is a major factor in the process. If you have 50 applicants for a job or 3 that would make a huge difference in the approach.
I wish I could agree more with more upvotes. One of the most important factors IMHO when hiring people is their personality and ability to work with the team. A battery of quiz, psych and trivia questions does little to reveal anything related to that other than what a person's stress tolerances are.
I usually just interview as a conversation. Likely I'm going to have to be able to talk to this person regularly anyways. Once that happens, they relax and I've found that their background claims tend to be far more realistic, more willing to point out their faults, and yet still have plenty of ability to discuss deep technical questions as well. But now it's not 20 questions it's "can you whiteboard the architecture of that project your were mentioning a few minutes ago?" And then use that as a point of discussion, e.g. "well why did you do it this way vs. this way?" They should be able to provide a reasonable answer.
Really what most employers want is somebody who's able to think deeply, justify their own thought process, demonstrate the ability to research and general technical acumen. Most likely their technical history won't be a 1:1 match for what your company does anyway, so they'll simply have to learn a number of new languages or development metaphors, use cases, architectures etc.
First I would try to get a feeling for the personality of the person applying for he job, to see if they would fit in, then I'd try to gage whether or not they had the required background for the job, and I might follow up with a question or two about that background.
A few people were caught fibbing and the interview was gracefully terminated. But for the most part, the people that showed up were honest and fairly candid about what they could and could not do. I've never felt the need to resort to 'trick' or 'puzzle' questions or questions that were meant to trip them up.
Psychological games with people that are already nervous tend to have weird outcomes, better to get them to be relaxed and to tell you what you need to know freely.
One guy even admitted to having stolen some office supplies from a previous employer (he had a hole in his resume).
The employer fired him on the spot but he was very capable, he'd learned his lesson and I ended up hiring him, he was quite amazed at being hired and was one of the best people we ever had working for us. And honest to a fault, certainly learned his lesson.
A couple of months ago one of my not-so-successful hires sent me a long letter of apology about some stupid stuff he'd pulled many years ago. I'd long since forgiven and forgotten, but it's quite amazing how decent most people are deep down. As an employer your main role is to bring that out in people. If you start by casting the relationship in terms of trick questions and such I think you're off on the wrong foot.
But then again, that seems to be the norm, so maybe I'm the one that's in the wrong. I haven't had people working for me for the last 4 years, and I don't think I ever will again, but still I wouldn't change much in the way of conducting interviews.
Probably the size of the organization doing the interviewing is a major factor in the process. If you have 50 applicants for a job or 3 that would make a huge difference in the approach.